Grope-A-Dope

The four-day holiday weekend is, alas, over. Most of us will now return to our work-a-day life, commuting to our jobs by car, bicycle, bus, and/or train. Many people, however, spent some time on airplanes this weekend as they traveled to celebrate Thanksgiving, and that meant going through the "enhanced" security procedures of the Transportation Safety Administration.

While the threatened slow-down action by protesting fliers didn't really get off the ground, disgruntled passengers still found a way to voice their pleasure. The ears of the TSA are hopefully burning with the response of fliers who were scanned or patted down by Transportation Safety Officers.

Yesterday's Boston Globe noted the new security features and the government euphemisms used to defuse the blatant invasion of privacy. It also noted some of the public's response to both the euphemisms and the humiliation encountered by passengers.

The aggressively bland language used by the TSA to describe these new policies — enhanced screening procedures, advanced imaging machines, enhanced pat-down — are classic bureaucratese, in which descriptions are seemingly engineered to minimize the meaning conveyed while maximizing the number of words used. (Classic examples of bureaucratese range from the benign, such as transportation project enhancements for flowers along the freeway, to the distressingly disengaged, such as man-caused disasters for terrorism.) Enhanced screening procedures raises more questions than it answers: Enhanced by what? For whom? And what, exactly, is being screened?

You'd think the government would have chosen a better word than "enhanced" for the new procedures, especially since that word, when coupled with "interrogations" didn't exactly hide the fact that what was actually being done was torture. That, however, is the nature of bureaucratese: it is language used to hide meaning rather than clarify it.

But the traveling public had a healthy response of its own to such abuse of language and their privacy. Travelers have come up with their own coded language:

The pat-downs have been dubbed "gate rape", "freedom pats", "freedom fondles" and "freedom frisks", "grope-a-palooza", and "love pats" (that last by Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri). The whole process has been called a "peel and feel".

Travelers had no real way to avoid the new procedures. If they didn't submit, they didn't fly. They did, however, find a way to protest the language used to justify the humiliation and they are taking full advantage of it. Hopefully that kind of action is carried further, all the way to their elected representatives and the White House.